


don't need no trouble (but sometimes trouble needs me)

by vulpesarctica



Category: Captain America (Movies), Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fallout (Video Games) Setting, Amnesia, Amnesiac Bucky Barnes, Angst, Army Veteran Bucky Barnes, Army Veteran Steve Rogers, Brotherhood of Steel (Fallout), Cryogenics, Drama, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Human Experimentation (mentioned), Human Golden Retriever Steve Rogers, Humor, M/M, Memory Loss, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Character Death, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Past Presumed Character Death, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Nuclear War, Quote: Who the hell is Bucky?, Railroad (Fallout), Reunited and It Feels So... Who are you?, Romance, Time Skips, Time Travel... kinda?, Vault 111, Walking Saviour Complex Steve Rogers, basically it's the avengers in a fallout 4 setting, i started noticing parallels between the two and couldn't stop so here we are, it will more be focusing on their relationship once they reunite, remembering, the fallout/cap crossover that nobody asked for, there will be some violence but i won't go overboard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-11 23:39:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18434510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulpesarctica/pseuds/vulpesarctica
Summary: In any universe, trouble seems to find Steve Rogers no matter what.orSteve wakes up in the year 2287 after being cryogenically frozen in an underground Vault for over two centuries. When he emerges in post-nuclear-apocalypse Massachusetts, he tries to carve out a new life in what is now known as the Commonwealth with the help of his new friend Sam Wilson, and come to terms with the fact that everyone he ever loved is dead. Except, well... one of them isn't.PS. I'm trying my best to write this so you don't need to know anything about Fallout to read it! Think Stucky in a post-apocalyptic setting. :)





	1. Stranger in a Strange Land

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _knockin' on my door_   
>  _was trouble that i knew_   
>  _i figured he would fall_   
>  _but it took me with him too_   
>  _always gonna pay for the kindness that you do_   
>  _for the kindness that you do_

Twenty-three seconds.

Twenty-three blissful seconds.

That was the exact amount of time that Steve Rogers was permitted upon waking to bask in the softly fading glow of a dream of Peggy - of the 21st century - of Brooklyn - before his brain caught up with his body.

“Fuck,” he muttered, eyes still closed, as reality came screaming back to him. _Language,_ warned his pre-war brain. His post-war brain had since reprioritised. It turned out that cursing actually felt pretty good when you lived in a nuclear wasteland.  

Then, like every morning - like a bloody scab that wouldn’t heal because he couldn't stop picking at it - he thought of Vault 111. Buried in the hills above him, he felt its ominous presence lurking like some ancient evil. That day in October when the bombs fell, dozens had fled to it on the promise of safety from the apocalypse. Families, children, the elderly. Now, it was no more than a tomb. A constant reminder of the world he'd been forced to leave behind. Everything that tied him to the 21st century lay dead in that terrible mausoleum… neighbours, friends... Peggy. So close, and yet forever out of his reach. They’d been tricked into glorified refrigerators for two hundred years, and now, by some cruel twist of fate, he was the only one who'd made it out. The sole survivor.

Steve blinked back the tears prickling at his eyes before they could form properly, and pinched himself hard on the arm to try and bring himself out of it. _Stop it. Crying won't help you. You have to keep going because they weren't given that choice._

He took a deep, steadying breath and squashed the pain down as best he could. Sitting up on the old mattress he’d been sleeping on, his right hand went to the Pip-Boy device fastened around his left wrist. The wearable mini-computer was the only positive thing to come out of his time in the Vault, so much so that he occasionally wondered how he’d coped without it in his old life. He attempted to tune the built-in radio to the frequency he’d picked up last night, but was unsurprised to learn from the static that his current location was well out of range.

Beside him, Rocket stirred at the noise. The dog had taken to curling up next to where Steve slept, which he found surprisingly comforting. He’d met the animal - a German Shepherd apparently unscathed by radiation - on the day he’d left the Vault, at what used to be a Red Rocket truck stop not far from his old house. When he’d encountered Sam and the others later on, he’d been informed that the creature’s name was ‘Dogmeat’. Steve hadn’t been particularly taken with that moniker, feeling it was a little insulting, and had renamed him after the place they’d first met. The dog hadn’t seemed to mind either way.

Once he mustered up the motivation to venture outside, he found Sam quietly tending a pot of something food-like on the firepit they’d built beside the house. The sun was only just beginning to rise, casting a rosy haze over the landscape, and the air was still chilly. A fine mist hung over the hills behind Sanctuary. There was no evidence that anyone else in their small band of settlers was awake yet, although he and Sam were both early risers. Steve sometimes thought that, in another life, he’d have made a good running partner... back when going for a morning jog was a thing people did.

“Breakfast?” Sam offered when he noticed Steve had joined him.

“What is it?”

“Vegetable soup.”

Steve made a non-committal sound and pulled his overcoat tighter around him. _If only you knew what vegetables used to be, pal,_ he thought privately. He returned to the house in search of something to eat out of all the same.

While they ate, perched on the cinder-blocks around the fire to make the most of the heat, Steve could feel his friend’s eyes on him. Stubbornly refusing to meet Sam’s gaze, knowing what the other wanted to ask him, he set aside what was left in the pot to cool for Rocket and then continued to sip the bland broth in silence.

Sam, it turned out, was not particularly susceptible to passive-aggression.

“So, I assume you’ll be setting out for Cambridge right after this.”

“My ma used to say that ‘assume’-”

“-makes an ass out of you _and_ me, I know.” Sam interrupted. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I didn’t know there _was_ a subject,” Steve replied nonchalantly, chancing a look in time to catch the other man’s eye-roll.

“Sure, man. You definitely haven’t been up all night worrying about that distress signal you picked up and how it went against everything you stand for to not go and investigate it straight away.”

Sometimes, Steve felt like Sam had a much better understanding of his character than he had any right to.

“...Not all night. I got a few hours.”

“Oh, well, in that case, _my mistake_.”

Having finished his meal quickly before the cold morning air could chill it too much, Steve set the empty bowl down beside him and scrubbed his hands over his face and beard. After a long moment of silence, he looked back to Sam. 

“You’re telling me you aren’t worried?”

“I tend to leave that to you these days,” the other man deadpanned. Rocket gave an exaggerated yawn beside them. 

“Sam,” Steve said with a frown. “If the people who made that recording are still alive, they could seriously need our help.”

“Which is why I won’t stop you going down there today to find out. But-” Sam held up a hand to stop Steve from interrupting. He dutifully shut his mouth from where it had begun to open in protest. “But I’m not risking the safety of people I already agreed to protect to come with you. You said it yourself - we don’t even know if the people on the other end of that radio are still alive. Go check it out, by all means, but you’re just gonna have to accept that I’m staying here.”

Steve couldn’t argue. Sam’s logic was solid. It would be madness for their small group’s two best guns to venture out into the wasteland and leave Sanctuary undefended, especially when Steve himself had been planning reinforcements for the fortifications they’d built so far because he was worried they wouldn’t be hardy enough if the worst happened. However, he knew he couldn’t ignore that signal.

“I understand, I do. I’m… I guess I’m just worried that I’ll get down there too late. And that, if I’d gone last night when I first picked it up, I could have helped them in time. I don’t know if I could forgive myself, if...” he trailed off.

“Sure, that’s the worst-case scenario. But we don’t know any of that for certain. Here’s what I do know: first, that the people who made that recording definitely weren’t your average wastelanders. From what you said, they sound organized, which probably means they’ll have enough ammo to deal with anything that might have gone bump in the night. Second, you sure as hell weren’t about to tell the twins to make their way back to Sanctuary on their own in the dark from that far south.”

Steve huffed out a sigh. “Well, that much is true.”

When Steve had picked up the distress signal on his Pip-Boy, he’d been accompanying Wanda and Pietro on a scavenging run at an old drive-in movie theatre. It was a decent journey southeast of Sanctuary, and Steve’s pre-war Bostonian geography recalled it as being not that far north of what used to be Lexington. The parking lot was littered with the rusting husks of old cars and a surprising number of feral ghouls. Though Sam had warned him about these, the first time Steve had encountered one he’d hesitated. His time in the Army had given him plenty of experience pointing a gun at enemies who were pointing one back at him, but aiming at a shuffling, withered humanoid that wasn’t even capable of speech seemed fundamentally wrong. Then, it had lunged at him with an unholy groaning rasp and attempted to take a chunk out of his neck. He didn’t hesitate after that.

Though he’d put an end to more than his fair share since then, they never failed to give him the creeps. Pietro had once gleefully explained to him that, since the radiation that had mutated them from the humans they once were vastly extended their lifespans, it was highly likely that many of the ferals they encountered were in fact born before the bombs even fell. Ever since, he couldn’t help but worry he was facing down someone he used to know every time he took aim.

Steve made the twins hide in a small workshed nearby while he took out the ferals roaming around the drive-in methodically, and once the ringing echo of his last shotgun blast had faded, he’d noticed the faint beeping coming from his wrist that meant a radio signal had been detected. Keeping one eye on the two teenagers as they began to search the old projection building for scrap, he’d tuned in to the signal and was met with a looping message: 

_‘...any unit in transmission range. Authorization Arx. Ferrum. Nine. Five. Our unit has sustained casualties and we're running low on supplies. We're requesting support or evac from our position at Cambridge Police Station. Automated message repeating. This is Scribe Carter of Reconnaissance Squad Delta to any unit in transmission range…’’_  

He’d have gone to check it out then and there, but clearing out the ferals had taken longer than he planned and the sun was already well on its way to the horizon. What Sam had said today had occurred to him then - there was no way he could justify putting the twins at risk by leaving them alone. He’d cut short their scavenging run and power-walked them back to Sanctuary in the dying light despite their complaints, and had fully intended to turn right back around and head for Cambridge before Sam and Scott had talked him out of it.

Obviously seeing the concern on Steve’s face, Sam leaned forward slightly. “Hey, I know you have a hard time ignoring a situation pointed south. But you did the right thing bringing those two back here safely, and we both know it would have been insane to try and head back down there alone in the middle of the night. Waiting a few more hours for daylight was the smart choice.”

Steve gave him a half-hearted grin as he placed the cooled pot on the ground next to him for Rocket, who wasted no time in devouring its contents. “You’re never gonna let me beat myself up in peace, are you?”

Sam chuckled, and landed a light punch on Steve’s shoulder. “Hey, I’ll be the first one to tell you if you do something stupid. Fortunately for you, that doesn’t seem to happen too often.” 

“Well, that’s because you always take-”

“-all the stupid with me, I know. You’re gonna have to think of some new lines for this century, Rogers. I’ve heard all your old ones.”

“That was a low blow, Sam.”

Sam stood up from the firepit, stretching his arms above his head with a twinkle in his eye. “You’re right. I should respect my elders.”

Steve shook his head with a laugh and stood up too, collecting their empty bowls and the pot Rocket had licked clean. “Laugh all you want, Wilson. We both know if it weren’t for my elderly ass, you’d still be holed up in that museum in Concord playing hide-and-go-seek with a hungry Deathclaw.”

“Oh, that’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is, I’m afraid.”

The two men laughed together in the quiet of the morning. If one good thing had come out of being unwillingly cryogenically frozen for over two centuries and waking up in a highly irradiated post-apocalyptic wasteland, Steve thought, it was meeting Samuel Wilson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from 'No Trouble' by The Weepies.
> 
> Thanks to the perpetually amazing [lilyconrad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyconrad/pseuds/lilyconrad) for beta'ing this chapter! <3   
>  
> 
> [Find me on tumblr!](http://vulpesarctica.tumblr.com)


	2. Oubliette

When he is woken, he is told it is the year 2281. It is the first year he can recall by date, but his body aches with the weight of all those he can't. The people who wake him call themselves the Brotherhood of Steel.

They tell him the place he is in is ‘a vault’. The way they say it implies he should find that significant, but he doesn’t. The vault has long been abandoned, they say, but the room he woke up in was sealed behind a hidden door. They ask if there are others like him. He doesn’t know, but privately wonders what they mean by ‘like him’.

They take him from the vault and bring him to a place they call ‘The Citadel’. The people there want to know who he is, how long he was in stasis, who made the cybernetic enhancements to his body. They want to know why his residual levels of radiation are so low. They want to know what the red star on the shoulder of his mechanical left arm means. He can’t answer them. His head feels like it's been hollowed out.

_‘Have you ever been to the West Coast?’_

He doesn't know.

_‘What year were you born?’_

He doesn't know.

_‘What's your name?’_

The only thing he can remember is winter. Blistering cold, terrible, excruciating winter. Blinding white, deafening, unending winter.

So that's what they call him.

…

 

They show him his face in a mirror, and he feels nothing. His studies the features of his reflection: the blue-grey eyes with heavy lids and the dark circles underneath them, the full lips drawn into a stern line because he can’t seem to unclench his jaw, the dark brown hair that hangs past his chin. He hopes for a memory, but none arrive.

They show him transcripts of data they found in the vault, hoping to jog his memory.

_‘The main vault was picked clean by scavvers years ago, so there wasn’t much to save I’m afraid. We did find some information on a terminal in the room you were in but… the data looks like it’s either been mostly erased or corrupted, so I don’t have high hopes… I mean, this thing looks like it’s saying that you were born in the year 2050. I can’t say I have much faith in it, but you should still take a look through just in case it helps you remember something.”_

It doesn’t.

…

 

Eventually, they run out of questions to ask him and exhaust all their tests. He doesn’t know if they found what they were looking for.

He’s free to go where he wants, they tell him. The thought makes him sick. He remembers the view of the landscape from the transport when they brought him back from the vault - barren, bleached wilderness and crumbling, blasted structures - and wants no part of it. He asks to stay.

_‘You want to join the Brotherhood of Steel?’_

He knows ‘want’ doesn’t come into it, but he joins anyway.

He is given the rank of Initiate, but after he completes their basic training exercises with flying colours in ‘half the time it should take’, he is promoted to the rank of Aspirant and assigned to a man they call Knight Commander Karpov. Karpov wants him to complete advanced weapons training. He can’t consciously remember handling a laser weapon before, but a strange muscle memory seems to take over when he feels the weight of it in his hands, and he bullseyes every target they show him.

He thinks he might have been a soldier, once.

…

 

By 2282, he holds the rank of Knight. On a patrol with Karpov, now a Paladin, and the rest of his squad, he stops dead when they pass by a lone bronze monument of three helmeted soldiers on a crumbling plinth. The tarnished plaque beneath reads ‘Anchorage War Memorial’.

He asks Karpov about it.

_‘Some big battle before the bombs fell. The Reds took Anchorage and it took the US over a decade to take it back. They built that thing after it was over. Not that it mattered, in the end. The people who were meant to remember the fallen didn't last much longer than they did.’_

If he wants to know more, Karpov says, he can ask the scribes back at base about it, but right now he needs to quit wasting his time and pick up the pace.

He doesn’t tell anyone, but for the first time since they woke him up, he remembers something. He can't tell if it's the monument itself, or the armour that the bronze soldiers wear, or even the name ‘Anchorage’.  By all logic it should be impossible, he thinks, but somehow he knows it without a shadow of a doubt: he was there. 


End file.
